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I was pursued by an immersive theatre troupe two of whom lay on the textured paving and performed a resuscitation she playing my girlfriend and he, I think, an off-duty nurse.

‘The work has not earned this,’ I told them, then phoned my girlfriend who didn’t answer; a child actor portrayed her mobile vibrating towards the edge of a stranger’s bedside table.

When my girlfriend called back they had changed my ringtone to ‘defibrillators’. An actress in a red bib gripped my waist and whispered “tell her you never want to lose her”

then said it again in Portuguese before dying unconvincingly in my arms. I told Maya I was in a kitchen emporium but tried to embed it with meaning. That ended the experience.

I followed the looker who had played the nurse and asked if he made a living by acting because I know it is tough. I followed him underground. I was beginning to understand,

I said, the underlying power of the work despite my reservations. He said he was late to meet someone. All the way home I eye-fucked the other people on the train. They were all actors

and actresses. I asked them how they made a living.

Dinner

Though I like to imagine my girlfriend alone with ravioli in a café where they know her name but mispronounce it I’m aware she’s happier being thought of in the Korean place her gay colleagues frequent – tossing porterhouse on a hot plate and receiving compliments for eating and still looking, the way she does.

I like to make life hard for myself so I straighten one of the men. He dismantles a raw egg salad and glistens at the lips. I turn two more, to see how I handle it. Soon they’re all enjoying the raw egg salad. Next thing you know she asks for her steak bleu. They’ve entered some kind of parlour. The waiter’s not even Korean.

Joe Dunthorne has written two novels, Submarine and Wild Abandon. A pamphlet of his poetry was published by Faber and Faber.